As many readers of my blog may know, I’m one-third of a long-running weekly podcast, Games at Work dot Biz (when I’m available to record) – and, I also consume a fair number of other audio shows myself.

The quest for an app

My usual pattern of consumption is during travel: train, plane or car, with the latter being the most frequent over the past couple of years, traveling to and from the maker studio. My daily driver devices are pretty much all Apple1 (iPhone, Mac, iPad, AirPods, Watch, the whole shebang). I’ve mostly been using Apple Podcasts for years, despite knowing that it has had a terrible reputation amongst podcast power consumers. The power of defaults…

It has been… fine… it keeps a list of shows I’m interested in, and mostly seems to get the synchronisation of listening progress correct across my iCloud devices.

The teeth-grinding issue it has, though, is interaction with other apps. I typically use Waze for driving directions, and every time the voice directions cut in, the Podcasts app will pause and then skip back an… indeterminate number of seconds before resuming. I’m not kidding – sometimes it will be 2 seconds, sometimes, as much as two or three minutes and I’m re-listening to a chunk of audio I’ve already consumed.

I decided enough was enough, and went on a hunt for a replacement. Three critical requirements – CarPlay support, good sync between apps and devices, and import from Apple Podcasts – and one nice-to-have, which was a Mac app for listening at my desktop. I was already aware of the names of the three most likely contenders: Castro, Overcast, and Pocket Casts. In fact, I already had the first two of these installed, so I’d obviously toyed with them both in the past.

Apple Podcasts does not offer a way to directly export an OPML file (a list of podcasts you’re subscribed to), but there are a variety of Shortcuts that purport to do this.

To my surprise, I didn’t see a quick way to get my OPML file into Overcast – maybe I was driving it wrong, but when I couldn’t figure that out, I gave up there, and uninstalled it.

Castro seemingly let me import the list of podcasts, but took a really long time to do so and defaulted to trying to download everything. Also uninstalled.

Pocket Casts, then. I’ll say this up-front: I’m presently out of love with Automattic, who own the app, for reasons I may write about another day, but knowing all of that, I am willing to give this a go.

I’m impressed so far. It provides its own Shortcut to automate the export-from-Podcasts, import-to-Pocket Casts process, and that worked flawlessly. I then went through my (lengthy) list and unchecked shows that have ended or that I’m no longer listening to, and got myself back on track with how I want things added to my listening queue. The app has an impressive array of options around managing podcast storage, playback, and more. I’m relatively sure that I don’t need the premium features, so that keeps me at equal cost to the Apple Podcasts option. It performed flawlessly in the car this morning, and looks tremendously similar to my earlier app choice on the CarPlay interface. I think I’ll be using this for the foreseeable future.

Some recent appearances

An update on where I’ve been appearing on other shows. I’ve got a couple of news items here (drop me a line if you’d be interested to talk to me on your podcast).

1. I was interviewed for Open Source Stories back in the summer, and that interview has just been published. It’s a discussion of my experiences helping Open Source software projects with their communities and contributions over time. You can read this online, or listen to the conversation as a podcast. I’m a big fan of amanda and Julia who make Open Source Stories, and it was an honour to talk with amanda about my career.
2. This week, I was a guest on FLOSS Weekly, the long-running Open Source podcast – it was originally on the TWiT network, and early last year moved over to be hosted by Hackaday, which is one of my favourite sites and communities online. I talked all about the new Mastodon 4.3 release, along with a bunch of other things related to the Fediverse. You can watch the show on YouTube (especially if you want to see the Mastodon plushie!), or you can listen to it in your podcast app of choice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TH4uKfE0bA

Oh, and a note to end on is that after OggCamp at the weekend, I’m more excited than ever about the various podcast and audio communities that exist in the Open Source space. I’m really grateful to Gary and Joe from the Late Night Linux family of shows for helping to drive OggCamp forward this year. It was also really nice to re-connect with Ken from Hacker Public Radio, and to continue conversations with fans of other free culture podcasts as well.

1. FWIW I heavily use a variety of other systems, mostly Linux (MNT Pocket Reform, Framework, various Raspberry Pi servers etc) and Windows as well. Apple stuff is the day-to-day, less fun, though. ↩︎

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https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/10/17/podcasting-updates/